“Can’t somebody bring me a one-handed economist?” Harry Truman is often quoted as saying this about advisers who weighed both sides of every question. The economist Walter Heller told the story in the New York Times in 1974.
Quote Investigator found no solid contemporary evidence that Truman said it. The earliest similar version it found appeared on June 12, 1936, in a Scripps-Howard editorial: “what the Republicans need is a one-armed platform writer.”